Tag Archives: louie

It’s been a big week for television coverage here at LARB. Along with Dear TV, two other excellent pieces on television appeared as well. While not technically Dear TV, they are featured in this recap. Including those pieces, we saw essays on Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, and Louie.

Dear Television, June 15–21

The Game of Thrones season finale was this past Sunday night, and Sarah Mesle has thoughts about it. Her piece, “Arya’s American Fantasy,” is concerned with the choices Thrones characters are confronted with, how they deal with them, and how this relates to American narratives of freedom (“the desire to go someplace else, where our choices will, maybe, be somehow different.”)

Maurice Chammah‘s extended piece on Orange is the New Black blends a real appreciation for the show’s aesthetic appeal with an examination of whether “we actually learn anything about criminal justice from staring at these women for 13 hours.”

Micah Hauser carefully considers the politics of laughter in Louie. From the essay: “As a show, Louie relishes the repeated trope — there are YouTube videos devoted to excavating the conceptual continuities throughout the series — and one of the most persistent is Louie’s own rigorous pursuit of women against their will.”

It’s summer, and times are changing here at the LARB Blog. In addition to the LARB Channels features, today’s post is the first in our weekly roundups of the essays written by the lovely folks of Dear Television. The essays are originally posted on the LARB Main Site (and can usually be found in the “Most Viewed This Week” section), and we’ll be cataloging them here each week for convenience. This week brought essays on Game of Thrones, Louie, and Mad Men.

Dear Television, May 31 – June 7

Sarah Mesle on the latest Game of Thrones episode, “The Mountain and the Viper.” Mesle manages both to recap the episode as only a true fan can, and also advance a painfully clever argument about names, and how “private names intersect with public categories — the categories a culture makes to create its sense of what’s real and normal.”

Lili Loufbourow on the last two episodes of Louie, “Elevator, Part 6” and “Pamela, Part 1.” A careful exploration, via longform essay, of Louie’s agency, his redeeming qualities (or lack thereof), and his instances of misogyny – and how they intersect.

And because we didn’t do a roundup last week, but this essay is too good to miss: Phillip Maciak on the latest Mad Men episode, “Waterloo.” From the second paragraph: “So Ida Blankenship wasn’t an astronaut. But neither is Roger Sterling, neither is Don Draper, and, most pointedly, neither is Bert Cooper. Burgerchef isn’t a family table, a Carousel isn’t a time machine, and the little boy who watches TV in your living room isn’t your son.”